


In Vitro

by TheWhiteLily



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: But I already said Eurus didn't I?, Character Study, Childhood, Creepy, Gen, POV Eurus Holmes, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 23:59:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12221598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: Growing pains of a young puppeteer.





	In Vitro

**Author's Note:**

> For fan_flashworks "pair".

You remember feeling awkward.

Uncomfortable, uncertain. Too small for your skin—or too large for it—trying to find and pull a thousand unlabelled strings at once, constantly aware that you were getting it all wrong.

The rules were difficult to comprehend. Trying to be what you were supposed to be, never quite sure when you were succeeding. Wondering why people kept trying to hide the knowledge that you weren’t right from you. As though you, with your mind, didn’t already know _that_.

You practice your face in the mirror. When you pull on _these_ muscles, the pair of faces does _this_. When you pull _those_ ones, they look different. You remember it. Practice it. Try to reproduce it with your eyes shut, but can never quite tell if it’s right until you check.

Sometimes not even then.

After a while, you think your twin sister behind the glass looks almost normal. At least she does to you, but hasn’t that always been part of the problem?

You learn to use other people as your mirror while you pull the strings on the puppet that has your eyes; learn to pick up the microexpressions that say you’re getting it wrong even when mouths don’t, learn how to pick it up even before then, before their eyes or even their brains pick up the wrongness, before the wrongness makes it all the way to the surface.

You learn to think a step ahead: to pull the strings on your own puppet in such a way that you’re actually pulling the strings on theirs.

_Hello._

_Ah, hello._

_How are you?_

_Oh, fine and you?_

The strings don’t always work the way you expect, and you’re not allowed a knife anymore to follow their paths and find how they connect, but they _do_ work, and you think— _think_ —that you could pass for normal now.

What a pointless exercise.

You stop speaking. There seems little reason to persist, really. The violin sings and wails and dances under your fingers; a more expressive, more accurately strung puppet than was any constructed from meat.

Your parents talk more in your silence. It’s almost more informative to watch them flapping purposelessly in the breeze now that their strings hang loose than it ever was to directly make them move. They converse openly over the top of your silent head without seeming to comprehend that not talking doesn’t equate to not hearing—or not understanding. Your eldest brother sees more, although he still seems unaware of his inability to see _everything_. His fat face looks funny pulled into Uncle Rudi’s grown-up expression.

And then comes the change.

Sherlock has always been your favourite. He’s always been unpredictable but he always _moved_ when you tugged on him, limbs jangling wildly on their strings as his cries pealed out through the day or night with laughter or screams.

It’s hard to tell one from the other—whatever Sherlock does is always so enthusiastic. His exuberance fills his body all the way to the edges and radiates beyond the surface of his skin: transient smiles and scowls somehow plucking a set of strings inside your chest that you’ve never worked out how to reach on your own.

He’s too slow to understand any but the easiest of games, too dense to guide his wooden puppet through more than the simplest melodies to chase your own, too distracted by manufactured oddities like the false gravestones, too delicate to withstand any proper scientific trials—but he’s yours, _yours_ , and when a family moves in to the property next door with a child his age, suddenly he’s not anymore.

Mummy and Daddy are pleased when you start speaking again, almost as pleased as they are with Sherlock’s new playmate, but no matter how you pull on the strings, they don’t seem to have the same effect as before. Sherlock keeps going back to Redbeard.

Your wooden puppet still sings for you, perfectly responsive to every movement of your fingers, but you’ve realised there _is_ something unquantifiably _more_ to the dance of the meat puppets around you. 

One night, you think you’ve managed it, because he’s laughing fit to burst and you can feel the strings inside your chest resonating in harmony. But it turns out it had been the wrong string after all, and Mummy and Daddy go back to talking over your head again, and to Uncle Rudi when he comes to visit until he hushes them with slantwise comments.

You don’t give up, because it doesn’t make any sense that Sherlock could be ignoring you completely and yet still plucking at you, even if it’s in entirely the wrong way. You wonder if you might be able to find those strings in your chest with the knife, but Mummy and Daddy and Mycroft had all been very clear that looking inside bodies was cheating.

Eventually, you decide you have to ask.

“How do I make Sherlock play with me?” you say to Mummy one bright morning, as Sherlock races out the door and down the lane to meet Redbeard.

“Oh, darling,” she says, and her eyes have gone shiny while her hand covers her mouth, “is it hard for you, being alone so much now that Sherlock’s found a friend? Maybe you should try to make friends with Victor as well. Sherlock might be happier to play if he didn’t have to choose between you.”

It doesn’t make much sense to you—if Sherlock was too slow to play any properly interesting games, Redbeard was practically inanimate—but Mother was right, Sherlock had a new string he was playing with now.

If you weren’t allowed to cut Sherlock open to find out how he worked—like the frog Mycroft had shown you, pinned out on a board, its dead muscles jumping in response to a touch from a wire and in exchange for a promise to only ever look at things that were alive from the outside—if you weren't allowed to do _that_ to Sherlock, then perhaps pulling on Redbeard would make him move.

Sherlock comes home loudly, that afternoon, cradling one arm like he can’t even find his own strings for it anymore. It strums that discordant spot in your chest again that Redbeard can make him laugh like that.

The next day he doesn’t want to go out with Redbeard. He doesn’t want to play the violin either, curled limp-limbed on the couch amid strings so slack that he speaks only in staccato monosyllables and the tight-wound bow of his back.

You slip out the gate to follow his friend back down the lane.

“Hello.”

You pull the strings in your face as he turns, his muscles moving beneath the skin in response.

“Ah, hello,” he says. His face does something complicated that you store up to examine later. “Is Sherlock really okay?”

You shrug, a motion you’ve learned to use to hide that you don’t understand the question.

“Want to go look for buried treasure?”

He lifts the eye-patch to see his reflection better in the mirror you’ve made for him out of _your_ face.

“Yeah!”

You watch him carefully from behind the glass, and you see the moment when Sherlock’s strings snap tight.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this and want more, you might enjoy my other story investigating Eurus: [Five Minutes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9408536), or young Jim Moriarty: [Some That Smile](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9105382).


End file.
